Puzzle pieces
by Savasta 101
Summary: "You were never a problem," she wants to tell him, with the same, quiet conviction he had saying, "You're so fucking beautiful."


Jack thinks some things are born broken.

Like a puzzle missing a couple of pieces, or a baby with a birth defect.

You're not supposed to feel sad when you've got everything; lost when the warm arms of the person you love most are clutching you tight. He's ungrateful, a real fucking mess, and getting drunk soothes that a little.

When you're pissed everything's hazy, right? You're floating along on a cloud of cocaine and everything's too blurry to focus on the disappointment in Ally's eyes, or to care about the flash of cameras.

Sometimes he wishes she was angrier. Wishes she would slap him or scream more – because then she'd be just as much of a monster. Instead, she holds his limp hand and talks to him soothingly like he's a child, not an adult drowning in his problems.

It's not apathy. Jack can't handle apathy. It means the other person doesn't care – that you're less than nothing. But Jack hates pity almost as much.

So, he aims where it hurts. Jabs at her looks:

"You're ugly." _She's so beautiful._

"You're so fucking ugly." _She's fucking beautiful._

"Get out." _She doesn't deserve his shit._

Recovery is a joke – it's like telling someone with terminal cancer, "Oh, you can be fixed if you go to meetings and try hard enough."

Jack's a terminal disease and he's infecting everything with his sickness.

There's no fixing that.

'Addictive personality.' said one of the psychologists at the retreat, where the rich people of L.A. send their screw-ups (Ally's label is paying. They're probably hoping he won't come back.).

Maybe the doc's right. And alcohol's been there so long his blood must be beer, and there's wine pooling in his withering heart, and cocaine blasting his brain apart.

And there's genes for being a screw-up, a real shit father, coded into his DNA.

Ally shows him her little bump, barely poking out above her pyjama bottoms.

"Charlie's going to be a big brother." she tells him all coy, her eyes sparkling.

"That's – that's great." Jackson says, and she kisses him, plants pecks all over his scruffy beard. _He's going to ruin this kid. He's going to be sitting in a corner getting piss drunk and staring with glazed eyes at this little thing that looks like him. And then his eyes will shift straight past to the fridge. "Fetch me a beer." he'll say, just like his fucking father._

Jackson feels sick. That's probably the concoction of powders he took earlier, rearing up in his throat. He rushes outside and vomits.

He comes to, to Ally's hand stroking through his sweaty hair. "I think that's supposed to be my job." she says jokingly, voice shaking a little.

Jack just reaches up and clutches her hand. His palm has a little vomit on it, but she holds on anyway, and hums their song.

_He's going to be such a shit father._

And then there's Rez, from the record label, telling him everything he already knows in his cruel, self-assured voice. "You're dragging her down." Rez says, matter-of-fact, just like the little voice in Jackson's head, barely heard over the constant fucking _buzzing_.

It's maddening.

This constant tiny fly _buzzing_around his head. This fuzzy soundtrack to every. Single. Moment.

Ally's velvet lips are pressing against him, and Jack can barely focus on them. He's not even high; it's seven at night, he hasn't drunk all day, he's even walked the dog and had a ridiculous health drink and Jack's still not there with her.

He's trapped in his own head: still a scared, twelve-year-old boy, and his dad's yelling but he can't hear him because of the fucking _buzzing_.

A hand reaches for his shoulder, and Jack flinches, but it's just Ally. "Here, drink some water." she croons.

"Yeah – drink. A drink. That's what I need." Jack mumbles, and stumbles through to the kitchen. He grabs a glass of whiskey and drops it halfway through drinking. The shards cut his feet. Shit.

And all too soon the pleasant warmth of alcohol isn't running through him, and the buzzing's back – ringing louder than ever round his head: _bzzzz, bzzzz_…

Jack pounds his head into the wall. It doesn't help much.

The next day Ally's lying with him in bed, his hand on her stomach and he can feel the baby kicking through the tight black spandex, like it's trying to burst out in protest. 'I feel you buddy.' Jackson thinks.

"I've got good news." Ally says with false brightness, which is how Jack knows that it's not really good news for her, but she's convincing herself for the both of them. When it's _really_good news Ally shoves him up against a counter and kisses him 'till his head spins.

"…cancelled my European tour." _Jack's infection is eating away at her, and her future, and she can't even see it. She's so blind to what a parasite he is._

And that's when Jack first knows. She'll be so much better off without him here.

The little voice in his head seizes onto that. 'Waste of space.' It mutters these days, when he crawls out of bed at midday. "So, fucking useless." It says when Jack's trembling hand pops open a can of beer. "Better off without you." He sees it when Ally's smiling brightly at him.

She's off to the concert, and Jack's never driving to meet her.

He takes off his belt – just like he took his dad's belt when he was twelve, the same belt the man would beat him with – and stands on top of this tiny little cabinet in their garage. His heart's beating like a rabbit against his chest, and his tongue's dry as sandpaper.

Better off without you, Jack reminds himself, and he steps into the void.

Ally doesn't think she knew Jack. She had pieces of him: that rare collectible card (her favourite one) was sober Jack smiling and humming and gazing at her like she was some angel. The card that was played most often was drunk Jack: happy and go-lucky, then unpredictable and angry when things didn't go his way. Those were the two pieces Ally got and she guarded them jealously, loved them with a steady kind of devotion.

But Bobby knew a different Jack.

The small, scared boy always looking for approval, re-appearing when Jack was told he'd need hearing aids, that he'd be deaf by the time he was sixty at this rate.

Bobby held him as he cried, then drank, then pissed himself.

And their son, Ryan, knows this shining, false version of Jack that Ally carefully assembles for him. Ryan knows that Jack was a good man but very, very sick and then he went to heaven. And that's true but it's missing puzzle pieces.

Ally was missing the puzzle pieces to recognise the look in Jack's eyes. That the small, scared boy was back: seeking approval from the world, for being so kind as to kill himself, and remove the problems he created.

"You were never a problem," she wants to tell him, with the same, quiet conviction he had saying, "You're so fucking beautiful."

Tell me something, boy  
Aren't you tired tryin' to fill that void? _Ally's so tired, of doing it all on her own_.

I'm falling _Like a comet knocked out the sky_.  
In all the good times I find myself  
Longing for change _She's hugging their son and she wants Jack instead_.  
And in the bad times I fear myself

I'm off the deep end, watch as I dive in  
I'll never meet the ground _She was so reckless giving him all of herself_.  
Crash through the surface, where they can't hurt us  
We're far from the shallow now _Another fourty years till' they meet again_.

In the shallow, shallow  
In the shallow, shallow  
In the shallow, shallow  
We're far…


End file.
